this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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it's worth noting (not that this makes it better) - that artificially removing features isn't a new thing with electric cars.
It's always been cheaper to build only the more expensive version of something, then artificially cripple it for the cheaper version. CPUs are a good example - most CPUs of a given series are basically the same hardware, it's just that the cheaper versions will be down-clocked, or have some cores deliberately disabled.
Before the tech existed to have heated seats be a subscription service, cars that were sold without that option, would often have the heating hardware still installed in the seats, it just wouldn't be hooked up. Hell, sometimes literally the only difference between the model with heated seats and without was whether they installed the button to turn them on
This statement about cpus isn't entirely correct. In the manufacture of precision electronics, there is always a reasonable chance of defects occurring, so what happens is that all the parts are built to the same spec, then they are "binned" according to their level of defects.
You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.
This is almost certainly not the case in car manufacturing, as while you could sell a car with defective seat heaters at a lower price point, what actually occurs is that cars with perfectly functional seat heaters have that feature disabled until you pay extra for it.
Except the ratios of consumer demand do not always match up neatly with the production ratios. IIRC there have been cases where they've overproduced the top model but expected not to be able to sell them all at the price they were asking for that model, and chose to artificially "cripple" some of those and sell them as a more limited model. An alternative sales strategy would have been to lower the price of the top model to increase demand for it, of course, but that may not always be the most profitable thing to do.